"Influencers have been given exclusive tours of the White House.... They’ve been wined and dined at lavish parties in New York and at State of the Union watch parties..."

"... in the White House. And they’ve been promised extraordinary access to party officials at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, where for the first time ever they’ll be given a special room of their own, outfitted with quiet spaces for making videos. At least one has been offered an interview with the president at the convention, but said he was asked not to bring up Gaza. Priorities USA, a super PAC supporting Mr. Biden’s campaign, has pledged to spend at least $1 million on influencers, some of whom will be paid to share talking points online...."

From "Don’t Forget to Like, Subscribe and Vote: Biden’s Rocky Influencer Courtship/The Biden campaign is trying to work its way into social media feeds. But the young, left-leaning voices that control the conversation aren’t making it easy" (NYT).

Trump's secret: hats... always hats.

I'm reading "Trump invested in a muscular turnout operation, and it paid off" by Michael Gold in the NYT.

Much of the Trump campaign’s focus was on enlisting 'caucus captains,' devoted supporters who agreed to recruit 10 friends and neighbors to caucus for Mr. Trump. To incentivize them, the campaign offered signed hats and chances to meet the former president. The campaign held trainings for caucus captains at its headquarters, where it taught them the ins and outs of caucusing so the captains could pass their knowledge on to new caucusgoers.... At his rallies, caucus captains and volunteers collected information from attendees, and the campaign followed up with emails, phone calls and text messages.... The campaign... deployed educational videos — one with a cartoon blob named Marlon, the other with Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law — that offered step-by-step instructions to first-time caucusgoers.

Hats and simple cartoons — here's that Marlon thing — maybe politics is far simpler than anybody but Trump understands.

ADDED: Political hats are a big topic. There are metaphorical hats — the hat that you throw into the ring, the white hat that designates the hero. And there are literal hats, like the shockingly powerful MAGA hat. And remember pussy hats? To go back in history, there's the liberty cap.

And look, here's a liberty cap, atop the flagpole, in The Great Seal of the State of Iowa:

"Empire creates a greater potential for revolution than did the modern regimes of power..."

"... because it presents us, alongside the machine of command, with an alternative: the set of all the exploited and the subjugated, a multitude that is directly opposed to Empire, with no mediation between them."

Wrote Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, quoted in "Antonio Negri, Philosopher Who Wrote a Surprise Best Seller, Dies at 90/He became famous twice: first in 1979, for his imprisonment related to the murder of a former Italian premier, and then 20 years later, for his influential book 'Empire'" (NYT).

"What I care about more than anything else is people in power having power and doing things properly..."

"... and not just sort of in-fighting and dicking about. And so Boris Johnson lost me the minute he started fucking it all up. I was like: All right, fuck off. I don't care who's in charge, as long as they're actually in charge."

I was moved to transcribe that, from the "Go nuts for squirrels" episode of the podcast "Giles Coren Has No Idea."

The statement was made by the co-podcaster, Coren's wife, Esther Walker, and it's the closest I think I've ever heard to how I react to politics. Now, of course, it's hyperbole. I was thinking of saying I only feel like that up to a point, but she herself must only feel like that up to a point.

The last sentence is especially good, and she's squeezing it in as her husband is well into his next overlapping statement: "I don't care who's in charge, as long as they're actually in charge."

You might think it's hard to listen to, a husband and wife talking over each other and trying to get a word in edgewise, but Giles and Esther show how to do it right.

"Paper architecture has often had a real utopian or critical underlying agenda to it... [It] was often explicitly anti-capitalist, and emphasized the possibilities of a post-revolutionary society."

"Today’s C.G.I. interiors, on the other hand, offer a fantasy of individual consumption and relaxation, but suggest a certain amount of political indifference. 'This seems like there’s no plan, no societal vision, no critique....Taking a historical view, to have anything appropriating fictional utopian architecture with no utopian vision is a bit depressing.' The earlier part of the twenty-tens saw an explosion of 'cabin porn' on Tumblr: a nostalgic, earthy aesthetic of Obama-era hipster Americana—all wool blankets and gas lanterns and flannel jackets—which, in hindsight, may have channelled a growing uneasiness about accelerating digitization. By contrast, the aspirational, hyperrealistic interior-design imagery on Instagram—some call it 'renderporn'—isn’t wary of digital life.... 'There might be a way in which C.G.I. architecture is appealing because it completely disavows the reality of scarcity—monetary, planetary.... There’s this fantasy of freedom, where the real pinnacle of freedom is doing whatever you want without any material constraints.'..."

From "The Strange, Soothing World of Instagram’s Computer-Generated Interiors “Renderporn” domesticates the aspiration and surreality of the digital age" by Anna Wiener (The New Yorker). A random example of what she's talking about:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Hugo Fournier (@hugo.fournier)

This had me thinking about the "layouts" in "The 3 Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch." The Wikipedia plot summary begins:

The story begins in a future world where global temperatures have risen so high that in most of the world it is unsafe to be outside without special cooling gear during daylight hours. In a desperate bid to preserve humanity and ease population burdens on Earth, the UN has initiated a "draft" for colonizing the nearby planets, where conditions are so horrific and primitive that the unwilling colonists have fallen prey to a form of escapism involving the use of an illegal drug (Can-D) in concert with "layouts." Layouts are physical props intended to simulate a sort of alternative reality where life is easier than either the grim existence of the colonists in their marginal off-world colonies, or even Earth, where global warming has progressed to the point that Antarctica is prime vacation resort territory....

Maybe people are using drugs with those "Renderporn" images. 

Interesting to think of these trips into Instagram as an alternative to travel in a world wrecked by global warming and disease and violence and excessive tourism. If the places don't really exist, there's nowhere to travel to and no one is able to get any closer to this unreal idea than you are. Instant equity. 

I think a better use of your mind would be to look at the Renderporn and not feel dreamily pulled in but to see it as insipid and disgusting. Resist the fake.

Which reminds me — the author of the New Yorker article — has a book titled "Uncanny Valley." I think it's a good idea to retain whatever aversion to the fake you've managed to preserve thus far.

FROM THE EMAIL: Policraticus says:

When I browsed the work of Fournier on Instagram I was immediately struck by how much they evoke the Renaissance paintings of the "Ideal City". The imposition of art upon nature can often be beautiful, but it is always seems sterile. Like the man who was disappointed in his modernist architect, I have to ask, "where do I hang my coat?"

Here's the Wikipedia article, "Ideal City" ("An ideal city is the concept of a plan for a city that has been conceived in accordance with a particular rational or moral objective"). Here's a painting from the 15th century:

"Facebook won't change its policies on fact-checking ads promoted by politicians or limit political campaigns' microtargeting abilities, the company said Wednesday."

"Instead, Facebook announced that it will expand transparency around political ads and give its users more control over the ads they see. The decision comes after the company endured more than three months of criticism from Democratic politicians and activists over its decision not to fact-check ads from political campaigns. In that time, Twitter banned political ads altogether, while Google announced changes to how ads can be microtargeted to users.... Facebook's decision to keep its microtargeting policy was in part a response to campaigns and other political groups that told Facebook that they rely on microtargeting to reach audiences they would not have access to without social media platforms like Facebook...."

NBC News reports.

Word that does not appear in the article: "Trump."

Let me go back to that WaPo article I skipped. It's heavy on the Trump: "Facebook executive says company was responsible for Trump’s victory but warns against policy changes":

Longtime Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth said in a blunt internal post that the company’s advertising tools were crucial to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and may help him win again but that executives must resist the temptation to make policy changes that would alter the course of legitimate political debate.....

"We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons..."

"A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet. Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money. While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions. Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale. These challenges will affect ALL internet communication, not just political ads. Best to focus our efforts on the root problems, without the additional burden and complexity taking money brings. Trying to fix both means fixing neither well, and harms our credibility. For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: 'We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want!' We considered stopping only candidate ads, but issue ads present a way to circumvent. Additionally, it isn’t fair for everyone but candidates to buy ads for issues they want to push. So we're stopping these too. We’re well aware we‘re a small part of a much larger political advertising ecosystem. Some might argue our actions today could favor incumbents. But we have witnessed many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising. I trust this will only grow. In addition, we need more forward-looking political ad regulation (very difficult to do). Ad transparency requirements are progress, but not enough.... This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address."

Tweets Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter.

I'm hearing about the "exhausted majority." Is that something different from the old "silent majority"?

A lot of people — including me, here, yesterday — are linking to the Atlantic article, "Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture" by Yascha Mounk.

I usually give the subtitle along with the title, but this article has a distractingly incomprehensible subtitle: "Youth isn’t a good proxy for support of political correctness, and race isn’t either." I mean, I can comprehend it now that I've read the article, but unlike most subtitles, it doesn't help you see what you're going to get by reading it. The use of the word "proxy" is, if not entirely wrong, entirely confusing. The idea is supposed to be that you're wrong if you assume that the older and whiter a person is there more likely they are to think "political correctness" is a problem. It turns out that all groups — except "progressive activists" — say they think "political correctness" is a problem. And the majorities are overwhelming.

The article draws from a new report, "Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,” which sorts Americans into various political "tribes." This depiction is a good quick summary:



Look at how many people are collected under the label "exhausted"! Obviously, we're a huge majority, and it's nice to see all the detail within the majority, but why are we all labeled "exhausted"? And why are "traditional liberals" said to be exhausted when "traditional conservatives" are not? The Atlantic article says that the views of the "traditional" and the "devoted" conservatives "are far outside the American mainstream." I guess the "traditional liberals," unlike the "traditional conservatives," don't belong in the "wings," and therefore get grouped with the "majority." But why is that entire diverse group, the majority, deemed "exhausted"?

To go to the underlying report:

In talking to everyday Americans, we have found a large segment of the population whose voices are rarely heard above the shouts of the partisan tribes. These are people who believe that Americans have more in common than that which divides them. While they differ on important issues, they feel exhausted by the division in the United States. They believe that compromise is necessary in politics, as in other parts of life, and want to see the country come together and solve its problems.

Is this group really tired or just hard to hear "above the shouts of the partisan tribes"? I suspect that the authors are using the term "exhausted majority" because they don't want to say "silent majority."

Here's the Wikipedia article for "Silent Majority":

"Reporters labor under the terrible requirement that what they report must be true. Opinion writers need to endure the less stringent demand..."

"... that what they opine be at least plausible. Nobody ever expects what cartoonists do to be either true or even plausible. That’s why we’re all as happy as larks."

Said Robert Grossman, who lied implausibly about Nixon, Bush, etc. etc. and tied the airplane in a knot in the "Airplane!" movie poster, quoted in his NYT obituary. He was 76.

Asked whether there was something undignified about his caricatures, he said: "Undignified?... Virtually anything has more dignity than lying and blundering before the whole stupefied world, which seems to be the politician’s eternal role."

"Here on land, the seasteaders propose, ideas about how to govern societies have stagnated. Politics is too entrenched..."

"... societal change comes slowly, if at all.... Seasteads would upset [the] dynamic, since each floating city would be small enough and modular enough that individuals could come and go freely, shopping for governments and social structures. If residents didn’t like one utopia, they could simply sail off to a new one.... [T]he Seasteading Institute makes clear that it will not be operating the cities itself. The particulars of each seastead’s political system should be determined by its inhabitants—or an oligarch, if that’s the way it turns out. 'Any set of rules is OK,' the organization’s FAQ page emphasizes, 'as long as the residents consent to it voluntarily and can leave whenever they choose.'"

From "Libertarians Seek a Home on the High Seas/The unlikely rise—and anti-democratic impulses—of seasteading," by Rachel Riederer in The New Republic, who observes that the seasteads represent "a very particular set of politics," politics based on the free market," and:

When [government] works, it protects the vulnerable and guards the commons—essential tasks at which the free market so often fails. Ocean dwellers will also need those protections. Much as we might like to, we can’t escape the political, even by walking into the sea.

"As I read the transcript of Wednesday’s Supreme Court oral arguments in the corruption case of the former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, I thought of the movie 'Wayne’s World.'"

"There’s a scene halfway through the film in which Wayne and Garth, the lovable public-access TV hosts, argue with Benjamin, the slick corporate producer, about giving their sponsor airtime. As they make their case against selling out, Wayne and Garth serve as pitchmen. 'I will not bow to any sponsor,' Wayne says, sticking his hand into a Pizza Hut box and pulling out a slice. Before the Court this week, McDonnell’s lawyers made a similarly convincing claim that he couldn’t be bought."

Writes Gilad Edelman in The New Yorker.

"By 'imagined,' Dr. Anderson did not mean that nations are not real..."

"... indeed, he wrote, any community larger than a village in which people know one another face to face is to an extent imagined. The 'deep horizontal comradeship' that characterizes a nation is socially constructed, he wrote, but also heartfelt and genuine; it explains why people die and kill for their countries."

From the NYT obituary for Benedict Anderson, author of “Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,” who had observed that “Unlike most other isms, nationalism has never produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbeses, Tocquevilles, Marxes or Webers,” and who, it seems, filled the gap.

"Feeling a strange, nervous equanimity. Yes, I care a lot about the outcome of the election..."

"... and I'm sitting here waiting for the news to come in, sampling the dribbled out exit polls, and fretting. But at the same time, I feel complete assurance that as soon as the outcome is known, I'll fully accept it... Despite all this political blogging, I'm not really all that political.... It is equanimity that flows through me. Time for a nice glass of win, a plate of pasta with Bolognese sauce, and a calm absorption of reality. UPDATE: 'A nice glass of win' — ah, so hope does live on! Time for a nice glass of wine and toast to hope! A glass to be refilled later, perhaps, in a quenching of sorrow!"

Said I, in my first election-night blogging, back on November 7, 2004.

How did I get to be a "Young Outsider"?

Though I am not young, it's where I fit in "The latest Pew Research Center political typology, which sorts voters into cohesive groups based on their attitudes and values, provides a field guide for this constantly changing landscape."

Oh, wait. That was before I took the quiz, based on reading the descriptions of the 8 categories. After I took the quiz — which never asked if I was old or young, so that's not the cause of this change — I became a "Business Conservative."

How about you? Read the text and take a guess at what you are, as I did, before you take the quiz, and let us know how you turned out.

"What we’ve witnessed in recent years is the popularization of street marches without a plan for what happens next..."

"... and how to keep protesters engaged and integrated in the political process. It’s just the latest manifestation of the dangerous illusion that it is possible to have democracy without political parties—and that street protests based more on social media than sustained political organizing is the way to change society."

Writes Moisés Naím in an Atlantic article titled "Why Street Protests Don't Work/How can so many demonstrations accomplish so little?

"What would Machiavelli have thought when President Obama apologized for the fiasco of his health care rollout?"

"Far from earning respect, he would say, all he received was contempt. As one of Machiavelli’s favorite exemplars, Cesare Borgia, grasped, heads must sometimes roll. (Though in Borgia’s case, he meant it quite literally, though he preferred slicing bodies in half and leaving them in a public square.)"

A paragraph from the op-ed titled "Why Machiavelli Still Matters," published in the NYT, marking the 500th anniversary of Machiavelli's letter announcing the existence of his work, "The Prince."

The authors, John Scott and Robert Zaretsky, professors of political science and history, respectively, tweak Americans for their moralistic demands for virtues like honesty and generosity.

The proper aim of a leader is to maintain his state (and, not incidentally, his job)... [even] pursuing what appears to be vice [to achieve] security and well-being.

Even in a constitutional republic? And did Obama receive only contempt because he was honest or because he was dishonest? It seems to me that the contempt arises from our discovery of the dishonesty, not from his punctilious pursuit of virtue. Also, you have to take into account that Obama was elected — he did not seize power — and he was elected because people saw him as a repository of virtue. How does someone who was given power because of his perceived virtue retain power when a lack of virtue becomes apparent? How can he shore up his power by looking even less like the person people thought they had elected?

What would Machiavelli have thought? He'd have to do quite a bit of rethinking to make that Cesare Borgia stuff into advice for an American President.

"Mort Sahl is the guy who inspired me to go on stage for the first time in my life, and when I saw him the other night..."

"... I had that feeling again of, 'I can do this,'" said Woody Allen, contemplating doing standup again.

“He was as great as I remembered... So I thought, ‘Gee, it would be nice to get up there and do that again.’... It’s a lot of work....You have to put together an hour of laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh. You can’t dawdle. In a film script, if there’s a laugh here and there, but people interacting in a meaningful way, it’s good. But on stage, you come out and you’ve got to get a laugh, and then another and another.”

Allen is 78. Can you picture him doing standup now? Did you picture Mort Sahl? I didn't know Mort Sahl was still alive. He's 86. Here he is in 1967, opening with a shot at that actor who wants to be Governor of California and proceeding to explain, using a blackboard, the difference between left, right, and middle (which includes a left, right, and middle, to the left, right, and middle, respectively):

What do you think of when you hear this phrase: "institutional flip-flops"?

I ask Meade, as I'm reading this op-ed by Cass Sunstein, that begins:

What are the legitimate powers of the president? Of Congress? Some people’s answers to these enduring questions seem to shift dramatically depending on a single (and seemingly irrelevant) fact: whether the current president is a Democrat or a Republican. These shifts amount to “institutional flip-flops,” a defining feature of modern political life.

In recent weeks, the filibuster has been the most prominent example...

Meade says:

I'm picturing the characters in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," shuffling about in paper slippers...

He demonstrates the drugged mental-patient walk.

Sunstein recommends the "veil of ignorance" as a solution to "institutional flip-flops." He's actually saying something smart, so smart it feels obvious and mundane at the point when you understand. You're all: Everybody already knows that. I'm distracted by the accidental metaphor "institutional flip-flops" — I know he didn't mean to make us think about footwear — which is intensified by the old intentional metaphor "veil of ignorance."

The veil goes over your face and puts a barrier between your eyes and the world you'd otherwise see, and the flip-flops go up between your toes and put a barrier between the soles of your feet and the ground they would otherwise come into contact with, not that the filth of wherever it is your walking doesn't rage up and contaminate the insole.



I'm distracted by the concrete.

"Not just the NSA... Political candidates, political parties, Super PACS and dark-money groups are among the most ambitious data miners around."

"They use data to supercharge their fund-raising, to target multimillion-dollar ad buys and to stir passions and fears at election time," writes John Nichols at The Nation.

"You come to the garden, you expect it to be people gardening. And these people aren’t gardening. They’re having a party."

" I was elected to get rid of that and get things done."

April Ward, the  president  — arguably ousted — of the Roosevelt Island Garden Club, quoted in a NYT article by Vivian Yee that depicts the political microcosm of a garden club in hilarious, delightful detail.

“Since she came, oh my God, everybody’s fighting,” said Raphael Elbaz, a longtime garden member.... “It’s like the slave became the king.”...

“People start to be afraid of having a garden when you have a dictator like that,” Mr. Elbaz said.

The final straw for many came when Ms. Ward declared that the formerly neutral territory known as the border plots, which encircle the patchwork of individual gardens, would be divided up and given to anybody who wanted them, even associates, no waiting list necessary, so that the border could be maintained with the proper shrubbery and florals. It was, full members protested, a violation of the two most basic tenets of the garden club: that one must wait one’s turn for a plot, and thus full-member status (even if it might take three to six years), and that associates may help, but may not own (a longstanding class distinction).

A coup ensues... Read the whole thing. And I'm going to follow Vivian Yee on Twitter.

Love being told that "the lawyers just signed off on" one of my stories
— Vivian Yee (@VivianHYee) April 12, 2013